A View From the Trenches by Hardknocks, a Guest Blogger!

A friend from college decided on a whim to apply to law school after being unemployed for over a year. She's received several acceptances to tier 1 and tier 2 law schools. Remember that excitement you felt when receiving that huge package in the mail from your law school of choice? I was a senior in college and the first acceptance I received was from a T14 law school. I was on the verge of tears standing in the hallway of my residence hall as I ripped open the thick brown envelope, eagerly opening the glossy brochures about public interest and study abroad programs and making the world a better place with my JD. I believed that this would be my ticket to a lucrative and rewarding career serving the public interest.

HAHAHAHAHA. Oh boy, was I naive.

Nearly five years later my friend is excited about her admittance into a lower tier 1 program and all I can feel is concern about her actual career prospects upon graduation in 2013. How can someone who has never held a full-time job after college, has a significant unemployment gap, and goes to a law school not even in the top 20 expect to be marketable in our new economy? And who are the people working in our universities and colleges who perpetuate the myth to 45,000 students each year that going to law school - any law school - will make their job search any easier?

My career service counselor in college never mentioned the debt and the risks of attending law school. She just looked at my social science major and my grades then asked me what I wanted to do with my life (a questions surely any 22-year-old should know the answer to). I mentioned that I liked politics and may want to do non-profit work or become a lawyer. Her next suggestions was that I take the LSAT as if that was the natural step any poli sci, English lit, philosophy, or history major should take if they haven't a clue what to do with their life. No one at any university of law school will ever tell you that a JD, rather than being a versatile degree, on the contrary could harm your chances of employment as Esq. Never has written about over the last year.

You see, university employees aren't paid to tell students the truth or discourage them from more education. They are paid to promote the myth that education undoubtedly leads to success, money, and happiness. All too often students come to the dangerous conclusion that the more education you buy the more success, money, and happiness you will achieve in life. Only until recently has this longtime myth been debunked. The Law School Scam movement and websites such as this one affiliated with the movement remain the only sources of truth on the internet for the majority of college students who won't attend Harvard, Yale, and Stanford Law School. Slowly but surely, more students who are coming out of years of formal education - some at the most elite institutions in the world - only to be confronted with six-figure debt and no job prospects are coming forward to tell their tale. I predict many more will come forward in the coming years as law school applicants rise and job creation in the U.S. remains stagnant amongst unprecedented unemployment. Now more than ever, the truth needs to be told about the risks, the debt, and the ABA rat bastards who continue to accredit criminals to steal more money from America's youth.

I commented at the incomparable Big Debt, Small Law (if you don't have BDSL bookmarked do it now) that despite attending a T14 school, a significant amount of my former law school classmates have been laid off from Biglaw less than a year out of law school. Some of these brilliant minds who Did Everything Right! will almost certainly never be hired into Biglaw again. Well, there goes three years and $150,000 down the drain! Biglaw and the ABA will always have an endless supply of fresh meat and those who don't make the cut due to grades, LSAT scores, or sheer bad luck during an economic downturn will be tossed aside like yesterday's leftovers. The TTT institutions will continue to grow and more students will be conned until we stop them with truth and testimony from as many law school grads as possible.

I can only reiterate what I wrote at Big Debt to my friend and others like her that they need to walk into law school with knowledge of the risks and the very high probability that they will be among the sweatshop temp workers in the basements of BigLaw, a very different reality from the dreams we all had going into our first law school lecture. Law students who aren't at the top of their class need to be warned about continuing their legal education and going further into debt with their fate already confined to $10/hour Craigslist law firms. My classmates, who frequented Above the Law to laugh at the sweatshop TTT grads, are now working alongside them to survive. The legal field, like the US economy, will never be the same again. No one is safe.